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Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Christmas Cards 2014

For my Christmas Eve post, here are the cards I designed for my family this year.

My mother always chooses the theme and style for our Christmas cards, and this year she wanted something like my Snow White pieces, which was quite a departure from last year's cards.

I originally started out a little bit more pagan and Germanic, with a couple gathering holly and ivy and bringing home a fir tree:

But then I suddenly changed my mind. I thought there was a bit too much going on in there for a small Christmas card – it's a concept probably better suited to a full-size illustration.

So I came up with three more concepts:

We chose the first and third concept. I have always done two Christmas card designs each year, and now that we get them printed at Moo I like to take advantage of the printfinity option as well.

The first concept was inspired by the festival of Saint Lucia, with a crown of candles, and the third features carol singing and mulled wine. Originally the dogs were brown and white, but by popular demand I changed them to the same colours as my cavoodle Myrna.

I worked on each card at about A4 size, first printing out my rough and using layout paper to draw directly on top of it with pencil:

And then transferring it directly to watercolour paper with technical pens, using a lightbox.

Here are some of the shots I tweeted while the paintings were in progress:

And then I sent them off for printing at Moo, along with two of the other sets of cards I've designed. When they arrived I used embossing powder to emboss the circular frames with gold: